Let's hear your feedback on Home Energy Pros!

As we near the 1000-member mark, we can all revel at the high level of member engagement: 94 Blog entries, 79 Forum posts, 372 photos, 66 videos, 25 topical groups, a coast-to-coast Events calendar with something happening almost every day .... and hundreds of posts in response to these items. Even more impressive than the sheer numbers is the super-high quality of the members' contributions.

All this in only 90 days.

It's a good moment to reach out and invite all of you to weigh in about what's working, what isn't, and what new features or functionality you'd like to see. We'll read each and every reply to this post and fold your feedback into our future planning for Home Energy Pros. Here are some of the things you might want to share your thoughts on:

I think we need training for posting multi-day events with only the first day's dates & times in the start & finish fields. Events-in-progress usually cannot be joined, but they linger in the events list as if opportunities, making it hard to see what's about to begin.

Thanks to John Carlson for his suggestion to have a more robust Advanced Search for Members.

You can now use the Advanced Search to search for Members by Professional Certification or Professional Interest (using key words) - in addition to searching by Name, Country, City, State, and Company.

I would like to comment on some of the posts that I read in the weekly recap, but I do not want to sign up for more "Groups". I already belong to too many Groups. I can see the use of Groups for LinkedIn, where there are people from many different professions, but Home Energy Pros should have energy pros on the site.

As a member of Home Energy Pros, you can comment on the Blogs, Forums, Photos and Videos. To comment on discussions in the Groups, you just click the link to +Join the Group. You don't need to create another login. You're already logged in. Joining the group will allow you to get updates on activity in that group.

I do realize that joining a group does not require a separate login, but that is not the point. I don't want to further divide my memberships and keep track of what Groups I have or have not joined. In the world of topics, "Home Energy" is a relatively narrow topic. I see no logic in further dividing it into 41+ sub-topics. That is just my opinion.

"In the world of topics, "Home Energy" is a relatively narrow topic. I see no logic in further dividing it into 41+ sub-topics."

Thanks to the Group feature here, I can send a single message to all who have identified themselves as interested in a sub-topic. I don't have to send it to everyone with an account and I don't have to post and hope the right people will find my message. I like the self-organization of it.

That said, some groups might be merge-able and some might be clutter, such as companies for which just a few of us work.

Evan, I have 2 big "concerns" with the DOE and this site. I do like and enjoy this site, but to a large extent, this is just more of our Government taking over and running our industry. Along those lines, the DOE is coming out with it's 4 new certifications, which as our big Government has shown, will dominate the industry. Being heavly involved with Building Performance, I am keeping up on these certifications as an instructor and contractor. I do think that information concerning these certifications and development/updates should be found easily on this site, as this is a DOE sponsered site. For those of us in this industry, it's a pain having to gather information from so many different sites (DOE, EPA, BPI, etc) to keep current with the quickly changing industry. The 2 biggest changes in this industry right now are the development of these 4 certifications and the SCORE tool, again, as they will be intrigal parts of this business. My 2 cents worth of opinion would be to have all the relevant information concerning these two issues easily accessible on this site. Thanks